


Bullets

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Bullets, Crimean War, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-09 03:17:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6887587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection, a compulsion?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bullets

Summers saw her the first time she took a bullet at Mansion House. It was much earlier in his tenure and he hadn’t been drinking as much bourbon then. He’d peered at her, as if he couldn’t quite grasp what he saw, but just looked at her and didn’t say anything as she slipped the minie ball into the pocket of her pinafore. For a few weeks, he asked her to assist at more surgeries and saw her take a few more. He never made a comment. He seemed to lose interest then and she worked with Hale or Foster indifferently, Summers when he deigned to leave his desk, his fortess of bottles. Neither Hale nor Foster noticed; Hale was too absorbed in himself and keeping the boy from hemorrhaging on the table and Foster, who was quick enough to suture and still look around the room, was not interested in her very much and so paid little attention. He was preferable to operate with since the boys lived more of the time and his hands were clever; he often did procedures in a way that would never occur to Hale and with a degree of elegance she had learned to appreciate. He had learned plenty in Paris it appeared, though not necessarily how to engage a lady’s attention. Bridget Brannan had given her an appraising glance once or twice, but she had a touch of the Sight and knew when to stay quiet.

She kept the bullets in a cigar box in her chest of drawers and she took them out most nights if Hale did not visit her and her latest penny dreadful was not holding her interest. The gore had grown dull and the romances ended too quickly and she would never be the damsel. She liked the sound they made, clicking and knocking about, some still stained with blood, others deformed by impact with bone. She had picked up the first bullet in the Crimea; that boy had died as she’d held his hand, a swift death she now knew was a merciful end. He’d been gut-shot. 

She never threw them out and she never filled the box. The lid had a faded image of a buxom brunette and something vaguely tropical to indicate Cuba or the Carribbean, she’d never been sure. She did not know what compelled her, only that she must take a bullet at certain times. Sometimes the boy lived, sometimes he died. That was not the deciding variable.

Anne Hastings did not have a casket with a necklace of cabochon garnets, the crest of a small German barony suspended at the center, the garnets a less expensive gem, the color of women’s blood. She was not a widow. She did not have a coral rosary with a silk tassel wrapped in a linen handkerchief. She was not a nun. She did not have a clutch of love-letters in a boy’s angular hand, the compliments hackneyed yet still heart-felt, and she did not have a small gold ring set with diamond chips from the same boy, strung on a velvet ribbon. She was not a Southern belle and she was no one’s beloved. 

Anne Hastings had a box full of bloody bullets and she was a witness and a Union Army nurse, a forgotten protégé of Miss Nightingale. 

She had a box of bullets she would take with her when the War ended. She had told herself she would find something to do with them, but she never did.

**Author's Note:**

> My response to the "bullets" prompt-- this time featuring Anne Hastings's odd collection. I leave it to you to decide exactly what the bullets mean, why she does it.


End file.
